Haffner Symphony Fingerings

I'm back! It's time for some weird but useful fingerings for the excerpt from Mozart's Symphony No. 35 (Haffner) that is often asked on auditions. I shared these fingerings with some of the New World Symphony fellows when I visited in January and promised that I would do a blog post about it. Since I have a performance of Haffner coming up in September with the Hamptons Festival of Music, it's finally time to get this out into the world.

Here is the typical excerpt, from the 4th movement, mm. 147–181:

There are two primary challenges in this excerpt:

1. Avoiding cracking on all of the flicked and half-hole notes.
2. Keeping pitch consistent across the middle and tenor registers, and under the influence of double tonguing.

My set of fingerings aims to help both of those challenges.

For the cracking, I am unwilling to compromise on flicking or venting tenor A and B (and B-flat and C, but those notes don't appear in this excerpt). The only way to be 100% sure that those notes won't crack is to flick or vent. For the half-hole notes, especially G-sharp, I'm realistic about how precise I can get my half-hole at a fast tempo and build fail-safes into the fingering if it seems risky.

For the pitch, we face two big issues in this excerpt. First is that we have some naturally sharp notes (eg. half-hole F-sharp) and some naturally flat notes (eg. tenor D) that can be hard to adjust at a fast tempo. The other big problem is that when we double-tongue, we tend to go flat. To reconcile both issues, I've picked fingerings that err on the sharp side but don't exaggerate the already sharp notes.

Now we will go through the excerpt measure by measure to explore my fingerings. Here's m. 147:

It is virtually impossible to flick/vent when you are going to or coming from a tenor C-sharp, since the thumb is far away pressing the C-sharp key. Luckily, there is a great fingering for C-sharp that does not use the C-sharp key! Thanks to Chris Millard for showing me this one:

I call this fingering the "B-flat C-sharp" since it uses the B-flat key. I use a lot of different C-sharp fingerings, depending on the context, and I use the B-flat C-sharp about 25% of the time. It's great for situations like this where you need your thumb free, and it also has a nice dark-chocolatey timbre. It sometimes has minor response issues, but I've found that those are negligible once you're used to it.

Another cool trait of the B-flat C-sharp is that it works with the C vent key depressed. This raises the pitch slightly and eliminates any chance of cracking. So, as you'll see with how I've marked my fingerings in blue, I use the B-flat C-sharp and vent the C flick key for the entire second half of m. 147.

Onto m. 148:

In the interest of picking sharp fingerings, I use the "resonance key" on D (the "R" in blue above):

The resonance key is a normal part of my D fingering, but I typically leave it off in technical passages because it's too difficult to coordinate my pinky. To my delight, I discovered that it works in this context because I can leave it down during the C-sharp as well. Is it sharp? Yes, and we like that!

For the C-sharp, I use the "claw" fingering, shown here in its pure form (no resonance key):

The rest of m. 148 is more straightforward: I flick the A's (indicated by "A" in blue), and I play the half-hole F-sharp normally except I leave off the whisper key (indicated by "NO") so that my thumb can hang out over the A flick key. In this case, I don't worry much about leaving off the whisper key on the F-sharp—cracking isn't a big problem on F-sharp, and I don't care if it's a little sharp.

New material appears in m. 152:

The only interesting choice in this measure is whether to use the resonance key on G. It is too difficult for the pinky to go up and down between the G and the F-sharp, so we have to make a choice about whether to use the resonance key on both notes or neither note. In the interest of using fingerings that are sharp but not too sharp, I've opted to not use the resonance key on G (indicated by "NO"). The resonance key lowers the pitch of G but raises the pitch of F-sharp, so leaving it off means that the G is slightly sharper to match the usual sharpness of F-sharp.

Similar principles apply in m. 159:

Again, I would not use the resonance key on G here. Like the first measure of the excerpt, I hold the C vent key for the second half of this measure and use the B-flat C-sharp fingering.

Next, look at mm. 164–165:

There are two new ideas in these measures. The first has to do with the tendency of half-hole G-sharp to crack. I worry about cracking at the beginning of m. 164 because I would need to open and close my half-hole between the A and G-sharp, so precision is tough at tempo. My solution is to not half-hole the G-sharp and instead vent the A key until the E. The vented G-sharp sounds a little airy and sharp, but again, that's okay here.

The other challenge in these two measures is the middle-of-the-staff C-sharps. The thumb has trouble going from just the whisper key to the three keys it has to press down for C-sharp. My solution is to omit the whisper key on all of the notes surrounding the C-sharps (indicated by "NO"). The whisper key is added on the B ("WK").

Finally, we arrive at the difficult octave jumps at the end of this excerpt. Fingerings can only help you so much here, but I will offer a couple small suggestions for mm. 172–175:

For the A's and the B's, I do not use the whisper key on the lower octave ("NO") so that I can keep the thumb close to the A and C flick/vent keys. For the C-sharps, I use the claw C-sharp for the upper octave, and I just remove my right hand for the lower octave (I couldn't figure out a way to notate that). So my fingering for the lower octave C-sharp omits the whisper key and low D key in the left thumb that we would normally use on that note. For the D's, I use the resonance key on tenor D ("R") and the whisper key on the middle-of-the-staff D ("W").

Finally, here is the excerpt in its entirety with my fingerings notated. Every time material is repeated, I use the same fingerings even if I don't re-notate them.

You may be thinking, "These fingerings are bizarre and convoluted. Why would I waste so much practice time learning them?!" Unfortunately, you will waste more practice time and perform less consistently if you try to fix the cracking and pitch issues with fingerings that make those problems worse. Think of my fingerings as a quick fix for this excerpt's big challenges. Yes, it will take a little while to get your fingers to cooperate, but the payoff is worth it.

A final note about practicing: To master this excerpt, it is necessary to be confident that your double tonguing is consistent and that your fingers are under control. Before trying to double tongue the excerpt, make sure you can consistently double tongue repeated notes for every note in the excerpt. To get your fingers under control, practice creatively (rhythms, metric displacement, intervals, etc.) all slurred with your new fingerings. 95% of the time students tell me that they're having issues coordinating their fingers and tongue, the issue is really just the fingers. The only way you'll be able to identify where the finger issues happen is if you practice all slurred, as tonguing masks finger blips.

If you give these fingerings a try, please leave a comment. I know that outcomes may vary depending on your setup, so let me know what works and what doesn't, or if you have other solutions for some of the problems presented by this excerpt.